Announcement
- 5 new sets of SPOT quizzes are available. You can get to them through your USYD eLearning site.
- Quiz 1
- Runs in the first hour of Week 5′s lab, 50 minutes long.
- 10 multiple choice from Excel, 10 multiple choice from Matlab
- Closed book – no internet / Excel / Matlab
- Worth 10% of final assessment mark
- Must attend the scheduled lab
Course material
(after the break!)
This week we started with Excel. We’ve had a go a solving an equation both graphically by graphs and using Goal Seek and Solver. When using Goal Seek, remember that what are you trying to do is to get Excel to play with an input value so that the output of some formula is what you want. Excel simply tries different values for you.
With Matlab, we started on changing the control flow from being straight from start to finish to branching depending on a condition (IF statement) and looping until a condition ceases to be true (WHILE loops). These are relatively simple concepts that are so important to understand. These concepts are so generic that they will appear again and again in later years.
Remember how I’ve shown you to step through the code (code tracing) to understand how the program runs. This is a useful skill to have to understand the effect of making changes to the code, say to calculate the average rather than the sum of an array.
Other matters
If you need any help, email me on engg1801help@it.usyd.edu.au.
See you next week!
ET